E - Notes relating to the Aborigines of Australia, by the late John Moore Davis

Summary

It is the fashion among many persons to speak of the Australian Aborigines in terms of the greatest contempt, as being far below us in every qualification, both mental and physical; and no doubt the degraded creatures met loafing about the bush public-houses deserve all that may be said of them; but experience teaches that it is no more fair to judge the whole of the Aborigines by the specimens alluded to than it would be to judge the Celt or Anglo-Saxon races by the police reports, or the scum met with in the haunts of vice and infamy; and those persons who have seen much of the blacks in the early days of these colonies can recall many instances of chivalrous daring, benevolence, and patient endurance of hardship and suffering, which perhaps may yet, in the hands of some Australian Cooper, “serve to point a moral or adorn a tale.”

That the whole of the blacks scattered over the Australian continent believe in a future state is indisputable; for go where you will–east or west, north or south–you will still find them strong in the belief that though they will die, they will rise again in the flesh, stronger, aye, and wiser than ever.

Their mode of disposing of the bodies of deceased persons differs in various localities.